When I played Virtue’s Last Reward back in 2013, I was left unsatisfied. Yes I had just spent an amazing time playing through a visual novel / puzzle hybrid with an engaging premise, intriguing characters, mostly enjoyable puzzle rooms, and an embarrassment of plot revelations, but in the eyes of my younger self, the game had committed a sin. It posed questions that it had not answered. Not everything was wrapped up. Sure the same thing had happened with 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, but 999’s unanswered questions are about its future. What happened to its characters after the game ends. Virtue’s Last Reward’s unanswered questions, are about its past. Replaying Virtue’s Last Reward, that memory weighs on my mind. What questions did the game pose, which did it answer, which were left unanswered, and most importantly, were the unanswered questions as big a deal as I made them out to be almost a decade ago. That’s what this video is about, and if you haven’t played VLR, don’t worry, except for one section which can be skipped, this video only contains mild spoilers. Let’s begin.
Dramatic Questions
After every gaming session I take notes. Notes on what happened, my feelings about what happened, and any ideas I have regarding what happened. Rereading my notes for Virtue’s Last Reward, it paints a picture of speculation. As the reveals started revealing themselves I made predictions. Most of these predictions turned out to be wrong, but the fun is in seeing where my mind was at that point in time. Even better is that early on in my playthrough I wrote down a series of questions that I wanted answered. They are as follows: Why is this Nonary Game taking place, and why were these 9 participants chosen? Why is K in the suit? Who do Clover and Alice work for? Who is Zero? Why does Phi know things she shouldn’t? Who is the old woman, and why was she murdered? And finally, What day or year is it when the game takes place?
That’s a lot of questions isn’t it? I like that VLR bombards the player with mystery. Even though I want these questions answered, they end up floating into the background due to the drama of the moment. It feels like the longer one plays, the more logs are added to the drama fire. The old woman’s body being found is an example of this, but then the characters find bombs planted through the facility, and Quark and Alice are infected with a virus known as Radical-6. And though these logs do increase the drama fire, VLR’s most potent fuel is the fallout from each round of the AB game.
The AB game is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this rendition the 9 participants are split into 3 groups of 3, a solo playing against a pair. Everyone starts the game with 3 points. Each side enters an AB room and chooses whether to ally with or betray the person they’re playing against. If both sides ally, everyone gets 2 points. If one side allies and the other betrays, the side who betrayed will get 3 points, and the side who allied will lose 2. If both sides betray, nothing happens. The scores stay the same. The game is won when a player reaches 9 points. They’re able to open the number 9 door and escape, but the door will only open once. If any player’s points hit 0 or below, they die.
In an ideal situation, each team would pick ally. They’d only need to play the AB game for 3 rounds, and then all 9 can leave. However, the best strategy is to pick betray. If you can’t trust the person you’re playing against, the only way to protect yourself is to betray. In the best case scenario you gain 3 points. If you’re able to do that twice, you could open the number 9 door in 2 rounds instead of 3. Betraying works defenisvely too. Staying at your current score is preferable to losing 2 points, especially when it can kill you. So while picking ally is the best communal strategy, the best individual strategy is to pick betray. I think you can see how such a game could result in conflict, especially when people’s lives are on the line and everyone’s motives are not always clear.
An Example
Another benefit of the heightened stakes making me forget about the questions I had, is that the narrative reveals are all the stronger. I’d like to use one particular string of reveals as an example. These reveals have nothing to do with the questions I asked earlier in the video but it’s also the reveal that hit me the strongest. Consider this a warning. If you don’t want to be spoiled, skip to the start of the next chapter. Ok, let’s do this.
There’s a Gaulem in the Gaulem Bay. Who’d have thought? He mentions that thanks to the advancement of ABT (which is artificial tissue indistinguishable from skin), one of the 9 participants is a Gaulem, a robot, and no one would be able to tell just by looking at them. “Oh this is going to be interesting” I thought. I had completely forgotten that one of the characters was a robot and I had no idea who it could be.
And then a lot of time passed. I entered the Gaulum Room on my first path about 6 hours in, but the payoff for the seed that the Gaulem planted didn’t bud until 22 hours later. In this timeline Sigma catches up with Alice as she’s about to commit suicide. Those infected with Radical-6 have their brain processing slowed down by the root of one sixth. A side effect of having the world appear as if everything is fast forwarding is the urge to kill oneself. Sigma finds Alice in time and wrestles the scalpel away from her, having his palm cut open in the process. Later when in the AB room with Luna, Sigma finally looks at his cut palm. A white liquid is oozing out of the wound. That’s not blood! With all the different timelines I jumped to in my 22 hours, I had forgotten about one of the characters being a robot, and never would I have guessed it was Sigma.
Except that it’s not! In order to learn the truth, Sigma agrees to have himself scanned by Luna. It turns out Sigma isn’t a robot, he just has cybernetic arms. This is a surprise to Sigma as he has no memory of ever needing to get replacements, and even remembers breaking his arm as a child. Still, what a fake-out. There wasn’t a robot in the group. It was just Sigma and his cybernetic arms. Boy I fell for that one. I thought the matter was resolved. I guess it’s because the next reveal didn’t hit until 7 hours later that I was able to put it out of mind.
One of the participants is a Gaulem after all. It’s Luna. The one who scanned me. The one who told Sigma about Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics. In retrospect I should have seen a lot of these reveals coming, but all I remembered going into this playthrough was who K is, and the truth behind Tenmyouji and Sigma. Now did the reveal hit me so strongly because I had forgotten about it from my first playthrough, or was it due to the time between the initiation of the mystery and its pay-off? Or did I just luck out and choose the paths that led to the gaulem reveal having its greatest impact?
The Intended Path
As I played, I kept coming back to the idea of the intended path. Which choices on the branching narrative chart would lead to the ideal storytelling experience? Which path would impart the right information at the right time? I marvelled at the work that would have gone into creating such a story. Making sure the right combination of characters go with Sigma in the right puzzle rooms to reveal the right pieces of knowledge needed to move the story forward, and how each round of the AB game would play out based on these combinations. The thing is, through the reveal I just told you about, I’ve learned that the order of things truly doesn’t matter. In fact, coming across a piece of information early on and then not having it pay off until almost 30 hours later can result in a stronger effect. In the end the player is going to travel down each path regardless, frantically searching for the keys to all the locked gates that start appearing in their way.
During a GDC talk, Kotaro Uchikoshi mentioned that VLR was inspired in part by a visual novel from the mid 90s called Komaitachi no Yoru. It’s a murder mystery. The player has the ability to name the killer right at the start, but if they cannot, the game continues, their choices leading to any number of bad endings. The information the player gains in these bad endings are clues. Clues that should lead a player eventually to be able to name the killer and get the good ending. The issue that Uchikoshi saw with Komaitachi no Yoru is that the information used to get to the good ending is not known by the main character, it’s only known by the player.
Hence why the player and main character are able to jump to different realities in VLR. Naming the killer in Komaitachi no Yoru is what we could call an invisible gate, but in VLR the gates are visible. The player will be working their way down a narrative path, a crisis will occur, and ‘To be continued’ will flash on the screen. Just like naming the killer, the player doesn’t have the information they need to continue, but because Sigma and the player can jump timelines due to the narrative flow chart, we can pursue another path, and once we have the knowledge we need, the black lock symbol will be replaced by a green book symbol, and we can continue down that path.
And since most of the character endings with their revelations are behind one of these locked gates, it doesn’t really matter the order the player goes through them, because the important reveals are meted out at the appropriate time. This explains why so many of the answers the game has to its questions are backloaded in the last few hours. Oh, and despite the entire design of VLR being a response to the way Komaitachi no Yoru works, there are invisible gates as well. Luna’s ending is behind one, as is Phi’s. Seeing the player has to write down codes to access these final two endings, my guess is that Uchikoshi wanted to test that the player was paying attention, and not just relying on Sigma’s gift to remember what happened in alternate timelines.
Conclusion
But despite the visible and invisible gates, when I hit credits, I was more than satisfied with Virtue’s Last Reward. After my first playthrough VLR felt like a setup for a larger story, and that too many questions were left unanswered. Replaying it, I do not find that to be the case at all. All the questions I wrote down near the start of my playthrough, the ones I listed earlier, were answered. The only questions I have left are “Who is Phi”, and “Just what happened in the Mars Mission Simulation test facility”, and I am confident that the final game in the series, Zero Time Dilemma will provide me with those answers. VLR didn’t pack the emotional punch that the DS version of 9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors did, but it shines just as brightly through the care it puts into its narrative flow chart, and how its many many reveals are portioned out over its lengthy runtime. Although I might be more forgiving of the lingering plot threads now as I know there’s another game in the series to answer all of my questions. Thanks for watching.
But what do you think? Were you satisfied with your path through Virtue’s Last Reward? Which reveal hit you the hardest? Let me know down in the comments. I would now like to thank the interviews and analysis that helped inform this video: Narrative Design in Virtue's Last Reward by GDC, and I Love Zero Escape by Hoeyboey. Links to both are in the description. So, what’s next? Well, just like with my 999 video, I don’t want to jump right into Zero Time Dilemma, so I thought I’d play a shorter game in the interim. The next video will be on Persona 4: Golden. That was a joke, I say, a joke. About the game being short. The next video will be on Persona 4: Golden. I started playing the game last year and while I haven’t returned for a few months, I was a ways into it, so I don’t think it’ll take too long to complete seeing how quickly I got through the 30+ hours of VLR. I hope you’ll join me for that one. Finally, if you enjoyed the video, I’d appreciate a like, a comment, and sharing it with your friends, and until next time, I hope you’re all having a wonderful day.
